FreedomWorks said Tuesday it will spend a six-figure sum on a new ad campaign opposing price control proposals on prescription drugs.
The Trump administration is considering proposals to create favored-nation rules via executive orders that link drug prices with costs abroad, according to reports. Previous efforts in the Trump administration to tie prices of drugs to foreign prices have not succeeded.
FreedomWorks said it will run three different ads on Hulu, a video-streaming service, targeting Republicans and independent voters.
“It’s time to talk about price controls and ’most favored nation’ clauses. They would set medical research back decades and make it harder for researchers to find vaccines for viruses like COVID-19 — that’s an incredibly bad idea in the middle of a pandemic,” a narrator says in one of the 30-second ads. “Stop D.C. from destroying your health care. Take action and tell them to fix patients, not prices.”
Other conservative advocacy groups mobilized in opposition to reports of coming price control proposals this week too. The National Taxpayers Union, a right-leaning advocacy group supporting lower taxes, said it was joining FreedomWorks and 15 other advocacy organizations in writing to President Trump in opposition to such price controls.
Signatories of the letter include Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, American Conservative Union Executive Director Daniel Schneider and Americans for Prosperity’s Brent Gardner.
“Any form of price setting is a treatment of symptoms not causes,” the coalition wrote on Monday in a letter to Mr. Trump. “Prices stem from the actions and demands of both individuals and groups. As has been shown repeatedly in countries with socialized health care systems, governments cannot expect to set the price of any good — let alone one as crucial as prescription drugs — below its market value without incurring painful consequences.”
FreedomWorks said its ad campaign on Hulu is focused on Washington, D.C., and will reach more than 1 million households nationwide.
As coronavirus has pushed more people to use video-streaming services, Hulu has emerged as a tool for those looking to advance public policy goals. For example, the CIA’s first-ever televised recruitment ad began running on Hulu last month.
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